Designing-in Crime by Designing-out the Social? Situational Crime Prevention and the Intensification of Harmful Subjectivities

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Abstract

Situational crime prevention and CPtED (Crime Prevention through Environmental Design) strategies have been broadly criticized within much of theoretical criminology. Most of these criticisms dismantle the notion of the fully rational criminal actor, questioning the shaky ground of classical criminology on which its claims are made. Through positioning hyper-regulated city centres as post-social, post-political ‘non-places’ of consumption, this article builds upon these critiques arguing that attempts to ‘design out crime’ create environments which are not only doomed to fail in their primary objective, but actively create environments which perpetuate and exacerbate the decline in symbolic efficiency and the narcissistic, competitive-individualist and asocial subjectivities which, as recent work from left-wing criminology consistently reveals, have the capacity to significantly contribute to forms of harm, crime and deviance.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)497-514
Number of pages18
JournalBritish Journal of Criminology
Volume56
Issue number3
Early online date20 Jul 2015
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2016
Externally publishedYes

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